"When the man with the gun meets the man with the gun, the man with the gun is a dead man." If the recovery was a kind of duel to determine who wins, then the villain protagonist's words For a bunch of dollars would be appropriate and the US, which is vaccinating the population at a speed that seems like a rifle shot that pierces the darkness, would be well embodied by Ramón Rojo (Gian Maria Volonté).
Except now there's a “good” how Joe Biden to the American Presidency, and at the end of Sergio Leone's masterpiece Joe (Clint Eastwood) kills Ramón with a ruse.
But above all there is that Covid-19 cannot be defeated in just one country, and not even in terms of economic consequences is it worth a sort of mors tua vita mea . At the opposite, in macroeconomics the union is more than the sum of its individual parts.
However, that remains the United States is doing better on the vaccination front and on that of economic performance. The two things, however, neither there nor elsewhere are closely linked, because herd immunity is still far off and we cannot afford a third wave that would result from the easing of restrictions on social coexistence with such a high level of official infections and, above all, deducible from the deaths.
However, the more or less positive trend of the inoculations affects the trust in the closest exit from the pandemic that Americans have greater than Europeans. Confidence that the democratic victory in the elections also helped to strengthen.
Anyway, America's economic performance is surprising in late 2020 and early 2021. Indeed, the acceleration of activity, which can be observed from the PMIs, defies the law of gravity of the pattern of deaths, the number of which became even more dire between December and January (and at the end of January it was worse than the average for the month). And it has made a mustache of the further restrictions introduced in all the federated states.
The same Economy hands, who predicted an economic slowdown as a result of the increase in infected people and deaths, must surrender to the evidence of an untame US economy. Not, however, without first noting that support from budgetary policy has been much higher across the Atlantic than on this side. A support that Biden's electoral promises, once kept, will further strengthen.
The extent to which further stimulus is needed proves it the trend of the American occupation, whose recovery from the abyss created by the pandemic has stalled in the last two months. Therefore the President of the FED, Powell, says well what he says and that is commented here in the piece on inflation. And if work goes badly where the economy is doing well, let alone here where it's much worse.
The vaccination itself represents, at this time, the most powerful weapon of economic policy that governments can enact. Because it allows you to quickly return to a life similar to the pre-pandemic one. Similar, but not the same, as some changes in spending habits and preferences will stay with us. For example, the increased online consumption. Of course, vaccinated populations will go back to consuming those services that are so penalized today by the need to curb the pandemic. And this would cause GDP to make a leap of equal and symmetrical strength to the collapse that occurred in 2020.
Italy it would therefore have more to gain than other countries, being among the countries that have suffered the greatest economic contraction. Moreover, it is also the country that has more NgEu funds to spend (absolutely, while in relation to GDP the economies poorer than ours would benefit more).
Putting it together large rebound space and deployment of European funds the political-economic program of the unborn Draghi government comes out. Which could also enjoy an opening of credit, in terms of trust, on the part of citizens. A one-two-three that is worth several points of GDP concentrated in a short time.
To paraphrase Giorgio Gaber, Italy would do a lot of good for once pretend to be a normal country, which does the things that most other advanced countries do without needing an emergency to justify an exceptional effort.
For the rest. The economic data released in the last month confirm what was expected by Lancet, ie that with the resurgence of the pandemic there was a new worsening of the economy. And that this deterioration is concentrated once again in services, while the manufacturing sector has continued to progress worldwide, although it has slowed down a bit in China, where it ran at breakneck speed, and the Eurozone, due to bottlenecks in trade in goods (including the real start of the Brexit: «God curse the English», and for once Mussolini cannot be blamed).
But they also confirmed that business investment they were the most dynamic final demand component. Both because the cost of capital is very low (and it makes it work Tobin's Q, i.e. to invest in new plants rather than in the acquisition of existing companies) both because the accounts of the companies are in order (from a financial and income point of view) and because technological obsolescence forces us to innovate in order to remain on the market.
There is nothing more powerful than investment leverage to kick-start the global business cycle. Also for this reason, and not only because most of the people most in danger will have been vaccinated and because there will be more public spending, we will see a strong acceleration in the second half of 2021.
